The biggest upset of this year’s Oscars took place weeks before the actual ceremony, when Zero Dark Thirty helmer Kathryn Bigelow was snubbed for a Best Director nod. Conventional wisdom holds that debates about torture and political bias in the Osama Bin Laden thanato-pic, which began weeks before the film’s release, derailed Bigelow’s chances at a second statuette. But the bigger story – one that’s hardly been told – is that Bigelow’s partnership with the Central Intelligence Agency during the production of ZDT inadvertently shined an unwelcome spotlight on the military-entertainment complex: the surprisingly close and definitely reciprocal relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon.
If, as some have alleged, the CIA did share confidential information with Bigelow and ZDT screenwriter Mark Boal – or lied to them – about the role of torture in the manhunt for Bin Laden, that’s certainly cause for debate, censure, and possibly even stronger measures.(Right.) But it’s not just the isolated cases of Bigelow, Boal and their sources that merit closer political scrutiny: It’s time we took a good, hard look at how the military-entertainment complex operates.
Cooperation between Hollywood and the military brass goes back to the 1920s, when the Pentagon helped produce Wings, the first Best Picture Oscar-winner. The relationship between the studios and the armed forces has waxed and waned in the decades since, but tends to get cozier in times of conflict. During World War II, for instance, the Department of Defense enlisted Hollywood as its virtual press agent: one Pentagon memo called wartime Disney shorts aimed at children – tomorrow’s recruits – “an excellent opportunity to introduce a whole new generation to the [newly] nuclear Navy.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, it wasn’t until the 1980s, after memories of Vietnam had begun to fade, that…
Full Story »Lincoln topped the nominees for the 85th Academy Awards Thursday morning in Los Angeles, the Steven Spielberg-directed film took 12 noms including the Best Picture and Director categories as well as Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis, Best Supporting Actor for Tommy Lee Jones and Best Supporting Actress for Sally Field.
Nine films in all were nominated for Best Motion Picture of the Year, including Cannes Palme d’Or winner Amour by Michael Haneke, Ben Affleck’s Argo, Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild — which made a strong showing Thursday with nominations for Directing and Lead Actress for nine year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, the youngest to be nominated in the category — Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty.
Notably absent from this year’s nominees for Best Director were Bigelow, Tarantino, Hooper and Affleck.
The 2013 Academy Award Nominees:
Best Motion Picture of the Year
“Amour” Nominees to be determined
“Argo” Grant Heslov, Ben Affleck and George Clooney, Producers
“Beasts of the Southern Wild” Dan Janvey, Josh Penn and Michael Gottwald, Producers
“Django Unchained” Stacey Sher, Reginald Hudlin and Pilar Savone, Producers
“Les Misérables” Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Debra Hayward and Cameron Mackintosh, Producers
“Life of Pi” Gil Netter, Ang Lee and David Womark, Producers
“Lincoln” Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Producers
“Silver Linings Playbook” Donna Gigliotti, Bruce Cohen and Jonathan Gordon, Producers
“Zero Dark Thirty” Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow and Megan Ellison, Producers
Achievement in Directing
“Amour” Michael Haneke
“Beasts of the Southern Wild” Benh Zeitlin
“Life of Pi” Ang Lee
“Lincoln” Steven Spielberg
“Silver Linings Playbook” David O. Russell
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
…
Lincoln, Les Misérables and Life of Pi lead the pack Wendesday among the 2013 British Academy Film Award nominations, with Spielberg’s pic on the 16th U.S. president receiving ten nominations including Best Film while Les Mis and Pi each received nine, also picking up Best Film noms.
[Related: Directors Guild Award Nominations: Was The Wrong Director Snubbed?]
Neither Les Miérables director Tom Hooper nor Spielberg landed in the Director category, however, though Pi’s Ang Lee made the category along with Quentin Tarantino, Michael Haneke for Amour, Ben Affleck for Argo and Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty).
The U.K.’s Skyfall, meanwhile failed to receive Best Film or Director nominations by the group, though it did receive eight other nominations, including Outstanding British Film.
EE British Academy Film Awards which will take place on Sunday 10 February at London’s Royal Opera House.
2013 Nominations follow:
BEST FILM
ARGO – Grant Heslov, Ben Affleck, George Clooney
LES MISÉRABLES – Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Debra Hayward, Cameron Mackintosh
LIFE OF PI – Gil Netter, Ang Lee, David Womark
LINCOLN – Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy
ZERO DARK THIRTY – Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow, Megan Ellison
DIRECTOR
AMOUR – Michael Haneke
ARGO – Ben Affleck
DJANGO UNCHAINED – Quentin Tarantino
LIFE OF PI – Ang Lee
ZERO DARK THIRTY – Kathryn Bigelow
LEADING ACTOR
BEN AFFLECK – Argo
BRADLEY COOPER – Silver Linings Playbook
DANIEL DAY-LEWIS – Lincoln
HUGH JACKMAN – Les Misérables
JOAQUIN PHOENIX – The Master
LEADING ACTRESS
EMMANUELLE RIVA – Amour
HELEN MIRREN – Hitchcock
JENNIFER LAWRENCE – Silver Linings Playbook
JESSICA CHASTAIN – Zero Dark Thirty
MARION COTILLARD -…
The film starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio is riddled with the N-word, but that has not turned off African American audiences. Also in Thursday’s news round-up, the Senate Intelligence Committee is set to investigate CIA contacts with the Zero Dark Thirty filmmakers; DiCaprio is headed for Santa Barbara fest honors; and John Turturro doc will bow NYC non-fiction series.
Django Unchained Popular with African Americans
The debate about the hefty use of the N-word has not turned off the African American audience. Quentin Tarantino’s latest film brought out an audience that was 42 percent black on Christmas day and is consistently pulling in 30 percent. Django Unchained has grossed $77.8 million in North America and may surpass the $120 million made by Inglourious Basterds in 2009, THR reports.
Senate to Investigate CIA Contacts with Zero Dark ThirtyFilmmakers
Senate Intelligence Committee is reviewing CIA records of contacts agency officials may have had with director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, but the committee does not have plans to interview the filmmakers. The CIA’s acting director Michael Morell also criticized the movie as “not a realistic portrayal of the facts,” Deadline reports.
Disconnect to Open Santa Barbara International Film Festival; Leonardo DiCaprio to Be Honored
Henry-Alex Rubin’s Disconnect will open the 28th Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Starring Jason Bateman and Hope Davis, the film explores the way digital technologies, which aim to bring people together, increase the emotional distance between them. Leonardo DiCaprio will also be honored opening night with the festival’s American Riviera Award on February 1st. Past recipients include Martin Scorsese, Sandra Bullock and Mickey Rourke, Deadline reports.
Gerard Depardieu Granted Russian Citizenship
…
“Can I be honest with you? I’m bad news. I’m not your friend. I’m not going to help you – I’m going to break you. Any questions?” are the haunting words that open the latest Zero Dark Thirty trailer spoken by actor Jason Clarke who plays Dan, a CIA interrogator.
[Related: Should Torture Controversy Blindside 'Zero Dark Thirty'?]
His character is at the center of a mini-controversy that broke this week by critics of the film by Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow who say it justifies the U.S.’s use of water-boarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques — considered torture by many &mdash’ as useful tools in the eventual successful hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
The trailer depicts the worldwide hunt from the boardrooms of the CIA in Washington, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and eventually Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jessica Chastain, who has received multiple critics awards and nominations so far, including a Golden Globe nomination yesterday, is the secret operative at the center of the hunt. The trailer hints at the slick telling of the story and ends with what sounds like a child’s choir singing a haunting version of Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters.”
Zero Dark Thirty Synopsis:
For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty reunites the Oscar-winning team of director-producer Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker) for the story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man.
Maya is staying undercover. At a press conference for Zero Dark Thirty, the film’s star Jessica Chastain, who plays the resourceful and indefatigable CIA agent who tracks down Osama bin Laden said that she never met the agent who inspired her role.
“I never met Maya because she’s an undercover CIA agent — it would not have been a good thing to do,” said Chastain, who said that she based her performance on the research she was given by the film’s screenwriter, investigative journalist Mark Boal. That research included reading Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and The Road to 9/11 and immersing herself in the surroundings of her onscreen job.
“I had the props person print out all of the photographs of the terrorists and I hung them in my room at the hotel,” she said. (The production shot in Jordan and India.) ”So even when I’d come home from the set, they were always around me.”
Given the unavailability of Maya, Chastain said, “I had to approach [the role] like any other character I’ve played,” explained, adding that when it came to “questions that I couldn’t answer through the research, I had to use my imagination, [director] Kathryn [Bigelow]’s imagination and Mark’s to create a character that went along the lines that respected the real woman.”
The actress, who’s currently starring on Broadway in the period piece The Heiress, said that the fearless, intelligent and extremely independent character she plays in Zero Dark Thirty “represents this generation of woman, and that was really exciting.”
Chastain has generated strong Oscar buzz for her intense, flinty portrayal of the always-analytical Maya, and she…
Full Story »Kathryn Bigelow’s angular thriller Zero Dark Thirty begins and ends with events that have been seared into public memory — the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the death of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, two incidents that bookended a decade in which America’s sense of security and place in the world were radically shaken.
The film presents the story of what happened in that dark space between. Using a combination of whatever details screenwriter and journalist Mark Boal could turn up in his research and cautious fiction, Zero Dark Thirty details how the U.S. was finally able to track down and kill the elusive head of the organization responsible for the worst terrorist attack on our soil.
But at almost two and a half hours long — an epic running time that never seems excessive but makes you feel the stretch of the years being chronicled — the film also teases your attention away from those known events, and brings it to the gritty, exhausting and sometimes ugly work being done on the ground and the type of people who engage in it.
It’s a curious thing that two of the awards season’s most significant films are stealthy procedurals: Lincoln, which beneath the surface gloss of a prestige biopic is a vivid showcase of the messy, difficult means by which the amendment to outlaw slavery was passed, and Zero Dark Thirty, which is an examination of how contemporary warfare has so much more to do with information than with sending troops out into battle. Both reveal the strenuous, time-consuming and ethically complicated efforts behind their well-known achievements.
While Steven Spielberg’s film uses these exertions to bring animation, prickliness and warmth to characters that could have been wax-museum distant, Bigelow’s…
Full Story »Kathryn Bigelow’s ambitious Oscar contender Zero Dark Thirty started out as a film about the 2001 siege of Tora Bora hunting down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but as the Academy Award-winner told a rapt audience at the picture’s buzz-building debut in Beverly Hills on Sunday, it changed direction in one quick, fateful instant.
“At about 10 o’clock at night on May 1, 2011 we realized we no longer had a project about the hunt for Osama bin Laden,” Bigelow said at a packed post-screening Q&A at the Pacific Design Center, “because he was no longer living.”
Bin Laden’s death sent Bigelow and her Hurt Locker collaborator, screenwriter and journalist Mark Boal, scrambling to incorporate the update into Zero Dark Thirty, a tense semi-fictionalization of the intelligence efforts, and subsequent nighttime raid, that led to the death of bin Laden. Folding actual events and real-life figures into a decade-spanning account, Boal’s script relives the dogged, desperate, and often brutal search for bin Laden through the eyes of a female agent named Maya (Jessica Chastain), a fictional composite based on real women who played key roles in the circuitous, years-long operations that sniffed out bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout.
Chastain, who was a lock for an Oscar nomination before Zero Dark Thirty even debuted, owns the screen as the driven workaholic agent whose tireless fixation on a needle-in-a-haystack lead ultimately proves vital to finding bin Laden. She looks a little too great doing it, too — a pillow-lipped, flame-haired beauty who manages to look luminous even when other characters are helpfully commenting that she’s rundown and haggard. (Offscreen, as in her new GQ UK cover spread, Chastain still has to play the glamour game, as most actresses do in order…
Full Story »Running a dense two hours thirty, before credits, Zero Dark Thirty reunites director Kathryn Bigelow with reporter-turned-scenarist Mark Boal in re-creating the hunt for Osama bin Laden, rejecting nearly every cliche one might expect from a Hollywood treatment of the subject. Far more ambitious than The Hurt Locker, yet nowhere near so tripwire-tense, this procedure-driven, decade-spanning docudrama nevertheless rivets for most of its running time by focusing on how one female CIA agent with a far-out hunch was instrumental in bringing down America’s most wanted fugitive. Spinning the pic as a thriller, Sony could beat the 9/11-movie curse when the Dec. 19 limited release goes wide in January.
Opportunely held for release until after the presidential election had played out, Zero Dark Thirty arrives shrouded in nearly as much mystery as bin Laden’s whereabouts before news broke that a team of Navy Seals had successfully terminated his life on May 2, 2011. The title, military-speak for half-past midnight, refers to the Al Qaeda leader’s time of death, theoretically promising a flashy first-hand account of the raid itself. But Bigelow and Boal reduce the spectacular assault on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, to the last half-hour in order to dedicate the rest of the film to the lesser-known backstory.
By forcing partisan politics into the wings (President George W. Bush goes entirely unseen, while auds’ only glimpse of President Obama is during a 2008 campaign interview), the filmmakers effectively give gender politics the whole stage: The pic presents the highest-profile U.S. military success in recent memory as the work of a single woman, “Maya” (Jessica Chastain), inspired by a real CIA analyst Boal discovered during his research, and presented here as the only government official…
Full Story »While there’s no shortage of burly action hero types in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, it’s Jessica Chastain who’s front and center hunting down Osama bin Laden in the first trailer — and that in itself is worth noting as you mark your calendars for the December Oscar contender.
I mean, how fantastically striking is the above image of Chastain, her shadow, and the American flag? Chastain plays a CIA operative attempting to locate the al-Qaeda leader, who was killed while in hiding in Pakistan nearly ten years after the 9/11 attacks.
Chastain is joined by Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler, Chris Pratt, Joel Edgerton, and more in the tale of how a global network of operatives joined forces to bring bin Laden down. Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal’s research for the film had come under scrutiny by right wing watchdogs, though that flap has died down in recent months. Expect buzz to start back up again, only of the gold statue kind.
Zero Dark Thirty hits theaters December 19.
Synopsis:
For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty reunites the Oscar(R) winning team of director-producer Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker) for the story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man.
[via iTunes]
